Session 135

July 18, 2026

The Silent Fathers

Venatrix speaks

Jazor was an Aedrimar, so the ink classifies him, on parchment kept by careful hands. But those who witnessed him gave him another name in their own tongue: the Silent Fathers. The Edryms were lesser kin, things that weren’t given power, following a great one that did, and they thrived. For Jazourh was vessel to not one shard of Elysia but two, and beneath that double weight the Edryms flourished on Lacuna. They flourished, and they built, and they did not count the days.

Until the Day of Tithe came, and counted the days for them.

The vision dies.

For a moment there is nothing. Not darkness, which is the absence of light, but a black so complete it seems to have weight, pressing in on you from every side.

Then, faint as a dying coal, a red glow.

It spreads slowly, bleeding across a landscape you know. An intricate lattice of silken webs, strung between the bones of the sky. A single colossal tree at the heart of it all. Edmeera’s domain. But the Weaver herself is nowhere. Her threads hang untended.

Something else has come in her place it seems.

Color returns to the vision, true color, warm and golden. It does not help. Some things are worse when seen clearly.

A creature towers there. Blighted is the only word the mind offers, and it is not enough. A massive crescent halo arches from its back, intricate in its craft and merciless in its lines: a crown built by something that understood beauty only enough to mock it. Its robes flow in ornate cascades, jagged where grace should be, imposing where mercy should be, every detail a parody of the divine.

It walks on two legs, and its skin is the skin of a man if a man were made by a butcher: patchwork flesh stitched seam to seam, no two patches the same color, the dead of a hundred peoples quilted into one.

Four wings rise from its back, and the two pairs do not match. The lower pair is leather, stitched like the skin, membranes pulled taut over borrowed bone. The upper pair is worse: a latticework of bones and the husks of dead astral creatures, wired together into the shape of flight.

Below its ragged loincloth, the dead make up its torso. A skeletal ribcage curves like the bars of a cage, and within it the dead lie heaped, creatures pressed against the bone as if the cage were the only thing holding them in.

Where a face should be, tentacles hang in a slow, breathing curtain.

One arm ends in a blade, long and curved and thick, the length of a grown man. The other ends in tentacles that stretch and coil and reach, always reaching, as if grasping for something it lost long before it had hands.

It approaches the Yllena tree slowly. There is no hurry in it. The End does not hurry.

Yllena is radiant. Golden rays pour down through an ethereal crown, globs of colored light drifting around her, their glow swelling and fading like slow heartbeats, like fireflies the size of moons. Her leaves are gold and silver both, her trunk veined with the same metals, and she rises for miles into the heavens of Edmeera’s domain until her highest branches are lost in light.

The horror stops a few yards from her roots. It regards her. Then it spreads its mismatched wings and takes to the sky, rising along her trunk past silver bark and golden bough until it slows at last and settles upon her canopy, almost gentle, the man-length blade lowered at its side.

The End and the Beginning

As the vision holds, static crawls across it, and it paints a different scene. Xanthos changes from the patchwork horror to the human avatar form in black bandages and wings of swords. Yllena, also in her human avatar forms, beneath the tree. Xanthos sits in his bandages, gloom draped over him like a second set of wrappings. Yllena is full of life and bright: golden light, wings, a halo. Xanthos: “The end of the beginning.” His voice is deep, resonant, the sound of a door closing in an empty hall. “I am the End, and you the Beginning. The lost… creatures… minds and memories… spirits… all of it drifts down to me. And you. Harbinger of all that may be renewed. We sit at the precipice of what is to come, and…”

A laugh interrupts him. Gentle. Bright. It moves through the canopy like wind through leaves.

Yllena: “Oh, Xanthos. We’re opening with such gravity today. Such sad, pretty poetry. I wonder if I’ll ever get you to stop long enough to see there is more to this than looking forward.”

Xanthos: “Hmmm. It does not work that way. You know this. And still you try. For that… I find myself curious.”

Yllena: “Curious! Listen to him. So you are serious, and I am not, and you think it a bore that I keep trying to turn you into something you’re not. But because I keep at it, because I won’t yield to the great stone wall of Xanthos and his deathly resolve, I’m the curiosity?” A pause, and when she speaks again her voice is softer. “No, dear one. You are a thing I want to know.”

Xanthos: “The End of Things. That is the name the tongues of rumor gave me. The mistake. Assembled from carcasses after spirit and mind had fled them, drifting into your keeping. You must be an optimist indeed to believe there is more to me than that. I am the scraps left after the meal has been played with, when no mouth wants more.”

Yllena: “Melancholy. You share that with Lune, you know. Always the shadow, never the light that casts it.” The globes of light drift closer to him, slow and unafraid. “Maybe that is why you keep visiting me, Xanthos. You are seeking something. Aren’t you? Something your visions, your premonitions, all your doomsaying… will never let you have.”

The vision releases them. The party sits at the bottom of the spire: basement stone, dust, a musky dark. Exactly where the mirror-maze left them.

Council in the Dust

The debate runs long before anyone climbs. Keep the mirror, or hand it to Caerulith as a gesture of trust? Dax argues it might buy goodwill; the counterargument is simple: nobody knows what it does yet, and a thing that dangerous isn’t a gift. Priorities get weighed the same way: the Eldon Order matters, but the party’s own path to Eden matters more. If they can’t follow Venoxyin’s footsteps into the storm, it won’t matter who else succeeds or fails. And Muvara’s actual counsel is dug back out of memory: not “kill them,” but convince the Order’s masters there is nothing in the Folly worth pursuing, so they stop coming back.

The landing party gets settled by elimination. Cerouse asked for the party’s Cindari, so Ember goes. Dax is the face. Aydriann rounds it out, on the theory that Cerouse’s frustration with Sypha Ignis answered his needling last time better than politeness ever did, though he’s under strict instructions not to talk. Aydriann ritual casts Telepathic bond but wizards folly’s Source interference has left him with another level of exhaustion. Two levels of exhaustion have left him at a minus four, so Dax burns both his high slots and a hundred gold of the party’s diamond stock on Greater Restoration, administering his own dose, with a flourish of diamond dust and shadow-puppetry, as an illusory energy drink stamped with a six-horned bull.

The City of the Water Heart

On the surface, Navani paces the sands near Saivannath’s hovering ship. Her hands sign the news: all is well, the Ondari kept their word, the ship is released. And Cerouse still wishes to meet the party’s Cindari. Speak to Verso and it will be arranged.

Verso, Cerouse’s son, offers to take them straight to his mother, and means it kindly: “I will assure you, you will be respected.” A magical elevator lifts them up into the floating city, and they walk its outer rings, guards watching with careful, ordered respect. Partway there, a small Ondari girl stops Ember. The ones who come and pillage look like Cindari; Ember looks like one too, but the girl has decided she is not bad. She presses a doll into Ember’s hands: blue-skinned, dark blue hair, swirling water-marks inked down her arms. “Her name is Anya. Will you be my friend?” Ember tries to hand the doll back, and the girl’s face falls; so Anya stays with Ember, on the condition that she take good care of her. Aydriann watches the whole exchange with the earnest sympathy of someone who knows exactly how hard talking to children is. Dax, after: “I’m surprised how not bad you are with kids.”

At the top of the spire, Verso leaves them at the elevator doors. The guard has been sent elsewhere so the party would feel comfortable, “but just know that she’s quite powerful, if you try anything.” Then he leaves them alone with the Sovereign.

An Audience with the Sovereign

The chamber is vast and smooth, wave-curved marble lit by the city’s light. Cerouse stands and turns, and opens with an apology: as soon as they sensed the spike of dark energy below, she knew what she had sent them into.

She gives them more than they expected, question by question:

The mirror. A mystery even to her people: “a portal to things that you desire.” The Ondari sought it as a way into the arcane storm that flows through Wizard’s Folly. When Aydriann (who had managed to stay quiet up to then) lets slip that the party hoped the same, and then tries to cover with a lie about relic-hunting, Cerouse catches it instantly: a quick, cold flicker of attention toward where the mirror actually is, filed away without comment. (When the lie comes up again later she waves it off entirely: “You risked your lives for it. You’re well able to keep it. Find another way.” The mirror stays with the party, with her blessing.)
The war. Over eight hundred years of it, and not, she insists, of her making: “We do not run up against Sypha’s forces. Sypha runs up against us.” The Ondari try to heal the land, turning the sands back into earth that can be nourished, and every time a healing project grows large enough to notice, Sypha Ignis arrives and wrecks it. Sypha believes the Folly’s ruin is what keeps the Edryms out: the last bastion, where she hopes to rise again. And she still seeks to destroy Edmeera. Cerouse has tried for an accord since the very first day. Sypha will not have it.
The Hearts. The crystals are what keep the Ondari alive: “the crystals are our hearts.” If Cerouse left, her people would perish, and likely she with them; Follykin who leave the Folly last a year at most. Which makes Ember an anomaly worth naming: born outside, surviving fine, not Follykin at all. It is here Cerouse finally asks, and gets, her name. “It’s Ember.” “I am Cerouse, the Hydromancer.” Ember also notes, almost in passing, that she has met exactly one other Cindari in her life: the tarot reader in the circus, long ago.
The eye and the storm. Why do Cerouse and the Ondari want into the storm? Cerouse’s answer reaches further back: “We are looking not for someone, but for what someone did.” Her scouts watched one of Sypha’s pursuits break off mid-chase; Sypha spoke with an outsider, and that outsider then walked into the storm, a thing no one does willingly and survives. A few days ago. Sypha and Vaeltharion city was chasing after Cerouse and Caerulith city. Sypha stopped her chase. Short time passed and an outsider appeared, walking into the storm. Party suspects Venoxyin. Venoxyin entered it, disappeared briefly. This is shocking as where every other outsider who dies in the Folly is simply lost, spirit wandering, going nowhere. Going into the storm is certain death. “We have been scrambling to find a way to get in touch with Velleyanna. Velleyanna is the eye, and we are the hearts.” The four Hearts still live, bound to their cities; and Velleyanna, the fifth, is the storm. Never able to talk to Velleyanna because of the violence of the storm, they sought out a way to look or portal in to get an audience.

There is one moment of levity mid-audience: Dax needles Aydriann about his lying (“you gotta get better at that”), and Aydriann, with love, puts a silent sliver of psychic force between Dax’s eyes for it. Cerouse watches Dax’s nose bleed, decides against asking, conjures a goblet of spiraling water, and snaps her fingers: cool healing washes over everyone in the room. The closest thing to a peace offering the party has had in the Folly.

And then she makes it explicit. Heal this place, and the Ondari could offer supplies, weapons, relics of Historia: real support, if the party truly means to save the world. “And I feel talking to you all, it will hopefully be better than what Sypha…”

She pauses. Almost stunned. Red, the color of blood, seeps through her dress, from her chest.

Blood in the Water

Behind her, where no one had stood, a woman straightens with a blade buried in the Sovereign’s back: Vesperine Noirmont of the Eldon Order. Her first words are not for the party. “Ezra, you fucking chicken shit. This was your task, not mine.” And Ezra resolves out of nothing, further back, having frozen rather than strike the blow himself.

Aydriann’s warning is already moving through the telepathic bond: we’re in danger; then, as the picture clarifies, the crystal needs protection, NOW.

Aydriann’s Arcana names the thing in the wound: Necrovoid, a void essence given to a weapon, and now an entity inside Cerouse, devouring her spirit. Not poison; his Mandate of Stone cannot wall it off. Not a wound; healing can slow it, never stop it. Sizing her up, the party puts the arithmetic together: the Sovereign of Caerulith, fully capable of battle, has perhaps five rounds to live. (Mack would have recognized it instantly; Necrovoid is what killed Adelaide. But Mack is 1500ft away.)

Cerouse spends her strength on one last working. The air turns to the feeling of breathing water; she gasps out that the party has tried to be her ally (“please treat us as such. Hold your breath!”) and the chamber floods floor to ceiling in a heartbeat. The water knows its friends. It slides past the three of them harmless, and takes Vesperine and Ezra like a living thing, bubbles swarming into them, crushing: fifty-six unresistable points of the deep, each. It is a ninth-level casting, and nobody in the room can counter it. When it recedes, Vesperine is on one knee, snarling (“you bitch”), and Cerouse is spent: still alive, still lucid, but too weak to speak, and a caster who cannot speak cannot cast. There will be no second working.

Vesperine straightens, and is almost courteous about it. To Cerouse: “I’m really sorry. Don’t take it personal. But we need this.” To the party: “Thank you for the distraction. If you just let this happen…” Ember’s answer is immediate: “I’m about to rip your throat out.” Vesperine’s reply is the Order’s whole philosophy in four sentences: “She needs to die. What did she do? Nothing. It is what it is.” Then, over her shoulder: “Ezra. Go!”

The fight is fast and lopsided. Vesperine turns her blade on Ember: one swing dodged outright; one that lands hard and meets Aydriann’s Mandate of Stone, Ember’s skin flashing to diamond against the blow, though the blade’s necrotic bite carves through anyway; then a warping, black-hole bolt that hits for twenty-six necrotic and seals Ember off from healing. “You make this harder than it needs to be,” Vesperine tells her. “Just go. Leave.” Aydriann’s eyes go electric purple, his own arm crusting into diamond to match Ember’s: “You made such a big mistake. You will not leave here alive.”

Ember answers with Judgment, the blade extending into a segmented whip-sword, Binding Lash snapping around Vesperine, but the Voidhand slips the bind, matching everything Ember throws at her even as the strikes graze home. Ember mirror-steps through the mists to Cerouse’s far side, twin afterimages peeling off her mask. Aydriann raises a construct of ice from Cerouse’s spent water, a faceless, clawing wall of frost that slams down beside Vesperine, and reaches out with telekinesis to pin her. Vesperine doesn’t even break stance: a counterspell, cold and precise, and the working dies on Aydriann’s lips even through his hard-trained resolve. She turns back toward the dying Sovereign. “She needs to die. Say your last words.”

Half a mile away, the card game on the ship ends mid-hand. The bond carries the alarm (Eldon Order, the crystal, now), and Rosibynne answers the only way she knows: the same hammer-swing that broke the ship the first time, swung with a natural twenty’s conviction, and the vessel roars to life under Saivannath’s bewildered protests. Five rounds to the Heart at flank speed. Orianna calls her warhorse: horned, masked, close enough to a unicorn. Mack readies the Dimension Door that can jump the last five hundred feet with one passenger, and the table argues Peach versus Orianna for the seat. Peach takes the bow with his goggles and reads the crystal plaza like a hunting cat: several of the city’s guards already lie dead. Four figures work the site. One making eldritch blasts, Amélisse. One hurls fire, Élodie. One, a Qirvani, Nimi, floats above the ground, moving things without touching them. And one calling the shots, visibly stronger than the rest, Peach knows on sight: Lucen, the man who interacted with them at Rune Spire asking after blue tieflings. The man who knows about him because of Sirius, and knows about his twin sister.

In the throne room, Ezra stops running long enough to cast, and looks at Ember while he does it. “You know you don’t want to do this,” she tells him.

“I have no choice, Ember,” he answers.

“You do. I will protect you.”

“It’s not me that needs protecting, Ember.” He pulls out a second dagger, kin to the one that’s killing a Sovereign. Ember makes her offer: “Keyvath is alive. You want to see her? You work with us.”

Ezra looks at her in surprise, but something in Ember’s resolve tells him it’s true. “Dammit.” Then the spell completes and he is gone, and the dagger is not. He leaves it lying on the throne-room floor.

Dax takes the last word of the night. Bardic inspiration on his own tongue, he walks his voice straight at Vesperine: “You don’t know what you’re starting. The Eldon Order doesn’t know what it’s starting. This will start a war in which millions die. You don’t understand what you’re doing.” A twenty-seven rolled, with everything he has behind it. For the first time all night, Vesperine hesitates. “You know nothing,” she says. But she says it looking at the room, at the dagger on the floor, at the crystal beyond the balcony.

Dax looks at the dagger. Looks at her. And stays exactly where he is.